This story begins on October 30, when US airline JetBlue Flight 1230 made an unscheduled diversion to Florida’s Tampa International Airport, interrupting the journey from Cancun to Newark. This is reported by the American Federal Aviation Administration statement“the crew experienced a flight control problem.”
CNN at the time reported the plane experienced “a sudden drop in altitude” that caused injuries to approximately 15 passengers. ABC News reported “up to 20” injuries.
In the following days and weeks, the incident seemingly faded into history – until November 28 when Airbus published a notice press release which opened: “An analysis of a recent event involving an A320 family aircraft has shown that intense solar radiation can damage data critical to the functioning of flight controls.”
On the same day, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published an emergency airworthiness directive to “address an issue that manifested during an event on JetBlue Flight 1230 on October 30, 2025.”
The Directive [PDF] explained the incident as follows:
The “ELAC” mentioned above is the elevator and aileron computer that powers the elevator, a hinged flap on the trailing edge of the horizontal stabilizer – the aerodynamic surfaces that look like small wings at the back of an airplane.
Horizontal stabilizers are essentially inverted wings because they create downforce to balance the lift created by the main wings. Elevators vary the amount of downward force to push an aircraft’s nose up or down
Whatever was wrong with the ELAC meant that the elevators pushed the nose of Flight 1230 down sharply and suddenly.
Remember the phrase “exceeding the structural capacity of the aircraft” above? That means Airbus discovered that the ELAC could move the elevators in a way that could destroy the A320.
That’s why Airbus, EASA and other aviation authorities have ordered all A320s with the problem to be repaired as quickly as possible.
“These measures may cause short-term disruption to flight schedules and therefore inconvenience for passengers,” the EASA said.
That’s an understatement, as Airbus has identified approximately 6,000 aircraft in need of repair.
Repairing an ELAC
Resolving the ELAC required rolling back a recent Airbus software update.
Industry sources say this The Register that the procedure required approximately three hours of work.
Airlines around the world tried to find the solution, but many could not avoid delays in their flight schedules. One reason for these delays was that the equipment to install the software was not available at every airport, a situation that EASA recognized by allowing airlines to fly planes without passengers to a location where they could do the necessary work.
A320 pilot Arjun Singh did that identified the problematic software version as “L104” and said the rollback was to version “L103+”.
What remains unexplained so far is how exactly the intense solar radiation corrupts the data.
There is no dispute that radiation can affect communication: solar flares disrupt communication on Earth and in orbit. The Register has seen theories suggesting that L104 may not have recognized the data damaged by solar radiation and the ELAC therefore acted on bad data and issued erroneous and dangerous instructions.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury has done that apologized for the mess.
“The repairs required for some A320 aircraft have been causing significant logistical challenges and delays since yesterday,” he wrote on Sunday. “But we believe that nothing is more important than safety when people fly one of our Airbus aircraft – as millions do every day,” he added.
Faury also certainly realized that this incident shared many features with the 2018 and 2019 crashes involving Boeing 737 Max aircraft, in which faulty software was found to have caused hundreds of deaths. Boeing’s reputation remains colored by that incident, as do its balance sheet and share price.
At the time of writing, FlightRadar24 reports major delays in some parts of the northeastern US. It could get worse The Register this story ended around 05:15 UTC on December 1, a quiet time for commercial aviation. ®
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